Electronic equipment often require extra cooling to transfer and dissipate the heat generated by the various components such as microprocessors, integrated circuits, etc. and the most commonly used mechanism for removing heat from a product such as a computer or server is a motor-driven fan in conjunction with a heatsink.
FIG. 1 is a front view of an exemplary housed computer system 100 showing how heat is typically removed. Typically, heat generated by semiconductor device 110 is transferred via conduction to a heatsink 120 comprising a plurality of fins (not shown) that in turn dissipate the heat via convection. A fan 130 mounted on the heatsink 120 draws ambient air, depicted by arrow 140, into itself. The outflow air, depicted by arrow 145, from fan 130 generates forced air convection at the heatsink fins, thus conveying the heat away from heatsink 120. As shown in FIG. 1, the ambient air is drawn through the front of a housing or chassis 150 and is exhausted from the rear of the chassis. Alternatively, the ambient air may be drawn from the sides or exhausted from the top of chassis 150. It is noted that FIG. 1 shows a desktop computer system in which the motherboard 160 is disposed at the bottom of chassis 150. This is regarded as advantageous in many situations because heat convection can be leveraged as an aid in removing heat from semiconductor device 110. In so called “tower” designs, motherboard 160 is mounted upright on one side of chassis 150, thus resulting in a horizontal configuration of semiconductor device 110, heatsink 120 and fan 130.
Because of the heat being conveyed by outflow air 145, it is not desirable to vent the exhausted air out of the front, top, or sides of chassis 150 where it may also be directed at a user of computer system 100. Additionally, noise generated by fan 130 can be problematic when outflow air 145 is vented from the top or sides of chassis 150. Finally, outflow air 145 may become blocked by an object placed on top of, or the side of, chassis 150 thus causing a heat induced failure of one or more components of computer system 100.
Many newer computer systems use greater amounts of power than earlier systems, thus resulting in more heat being generated. As a result, the volume of outflow air from these newer computer systems must be increased to prevent heat induced failure of their components, thereby increasing the amount of unwanted noise generated by these computer systems.